Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Chen Goldberg @GoldbergChen and Aparna Sinha @apbhatnagar will be speaking about the integrated stack of Kubernetes and Istio for Cloud Services Platform and On-Prem GKE. Cloud Services Platform has been built with Consistent experience, Centralized control, Agility with Flexibility in mind. Cloud Services Platform is targeted for Hybrid infrastructure. This enables Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment “CI/CD” across enterprise and Public Cloud environments. Today this is complicated. Cloud Services Platform overcomes these limitations and is powered by Google Kubernetes Engine “GKE”.

Cloud Services Platform provides consistency of service, development and management across environments. GKE On-Prem is a software kit which can be deployed on enterprise server hardware. From within the Cloud Services Platform in GCP console you can add your GKE On-Prem environment. Adding it generates a registration manifest which you apply to finish connecting GKE On-Prem to Google Cloud Services Platform.

Once integrated you have visibility into the On-Prem GKE platform from within GCP console. You can deploy from GCP console to the On-Prem GKE cluster. In addition, GKE Policy Management is being released to provide synching of namespaces, RBAC polices and secure cluster management. A demo is shown across 3 clusters in both Google and On-Prem GKE in which an RBAC role policy to allow pod deployments for development only. The policy is stored in a Git repository and then pushed to all the clusters.

Cloud Services Platform leverages Istio which manages business services levels. It decouples operations from development by providing common capabilities that every app requires. A demo shows a sample application written in four “4” different programming languages. Istio is pushed to the environment to provide generic services across all languages without code changes. An authentication policy is pushed to enable mTLS authentication across all code bases that make up the application to enable client side authentication.

Jeff White the Platform Architect at eBay is invited to talk about how they are using Google Cloud Platform. eBay leverages Istio to observe metrics and tune existing applications. They are also using Istio to have consistent policies across their environments. Further adoption of Google Cloud Platform and Istio are planned as they move forward.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Velostrata will monitor workloads on VMware and recommend classifications with the appropriate sizing. This expands on Google Clouds cost savings like sustained use discounts and custom workload sizes. You can live test your migrations using a Test Clone. This allows you to snapshot a number of VMs and bring them up in isolation on GCP. You can do that via the console or an API call. You can also due site-level bandwidth throttling. This is important because most enterprises will throttle in but not necessarily throttle outgoing traffic. Velostrata Network settings enable you to set a bandwidth cap on all migration traffic from a specific site.

The solution is built to work within your private enterprise space so it will work behind NAT and proxies. Velostrata runs a hosted service to collect telemetry and log aggregation data for your migrations. Google recommends that you use discovery and assessment tools to define what moves and the appropriate order. It is important to develop a pipeline so that you can keep the migrations moving over at a predetermined rate and tempo for large customers. Google recommends that you run the migration in sprints, migrating within in a week while identifying the next workloads for the week following .

The Velostrata migration component is tightly integrated with VMware vCenter. You simply right click the VM and select migrate. The migration wizard enables you to select the Google VPC and makes recommendations for sizing. The monitoring is of the migration is done within the vCenter console. Any migration alerts or notifications are propagated into the vCenter monitoring system. You can both failover and failback.

Velostrata has full runbook automation capabilities. You create a runbook from within the Velostrata web console. The runbook is exported in csv format which allows you to filter and order the migrations. You can then pass the csv through the rightsizing module to determine what the appropriate Google class for the workload is. As it is developed in spreadsheet format the runbook is self documenting. To effect the migration you pass the csv to the migration job engine which displays the status of the migration of the group of VMs in the runbook.

Diane Greene the CEO of Google Cloud takes the stage. Diane welcomes everyone and mentions that they have 25,000 registered attendees of Google Next. This is up from approximately 6000 attendees at the last event.

Diane mentions that information is starting to power every business. IT has gone from being a cost center to a driver for the business. Tech is now core to every product. Talking to CEOs, they realize that they are going to be shutting down their datacenters. Google is seeing amazing growth based on this trend.

But why Google? Google’s business is information. Google has a cloud which takes in information and organizes it in a way no one else can. Google has spent 20 years scaling and optimizing their platform. Diane’s job is really to surface all these greats innovations.

Diane mentions the products in data analytics, G Suite and Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence “AI”. Google is a world leader in security. Everything starts with the Titan chip that encrypts at rest and in transit either using Google’s or your encryption keys. There is no more secure setup then combining a Chrome book, G Suite and two-factor authentication. For example G Suite stops 99.99 % of spam and phishing attacks. Today AI is built into everything Google does like datacenter energy use and BigQuery. Google wants GCP to be the best place for open source development.

Kubernetes is the fastest moving development\container platform of all time. Google has been named leader in Infrastructure-as-a-Service “IaaS” and content collaboration by Gartner. Look at all the Gartner and Forrester Google rankings here https://cloud.google.com/analyst-reports/

Mike McNamara @MikeMcnamara the Chief Info and Digital Officer for Target @Target is welcomed onto stage. Target insourced their environment and reorganized around product, agile and DevOps methods. Mike chose Google because of shared values, site reliability and good synergies between their engineers. Google has increased their number of engineers and increased their “Office of the CTO” “OCTO” personal significantly to assist with these engineering discussions.

Google’s mission is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google’s Cloud mission is to organize your information.

Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai the CEO of Google is invited to stage. Google’s customers have grown to include not just consumers and developers but enterprise customers and partners. Google is committed to having an open platform. The Google phone was launched in 2008 with one provider and now they have over 24,000 devices. Kubernetes went from its initial release four years ago to number one. 75% of enterprises use Kubernetes. Google created TensorFlow so that anyone can use AI. AI is helping doctors diagnose patients faster with better treatments. Google wants to bring an AI first approach to all customers. That is what Googles Cloud journey is all about at its heart.

Urs Holzle @uhoelzle the SVP of Technical Infrastructure is introduced. Urs wants to talk about how Google is bringing the Cloud to you. Urs mentions that Cloud computing is missing a simple way to combine your enterprise with one or multiple cloud providers. Cloud providers differentiate in a way that are not necessarily different such as creating a VM. Each has its own way of setting things up. This gets really complicated in a Hybrid or multi-cloud environment. Administration has become the key expense. While server costs have fallen, administration has increased significantly.

Google is extending Kubernetes using Istio. Istio makes service to service connections easy and reliable. Istio is a collaboration between Google, Pivotal, Redhat and Tigera. Today Istio is available. Google has announces Cloud Services Platform which is a combination of Kubernetes “GKE” and Istio. Full integration with Stackdriver will be available from day one.

A demo is shown of a retail web based application. The app is deployed in GKE (Kubernetes). Through Google Cloud Platform you get a visibility on all clusters. Once Istio is deployed you get a service map in Stackdriver. Istio automatically works out of the box. You can drill down on the service map and see latency between the different retail application GKE components. You can also define Business service levels to track deviation from the business goals of the applications. Using Istio you get a common service platform with lower operational overhead and service requirements.

Google announces GKE on premises. With Google Cloud platform you can manage a GKE platform in Google or deployed in your datacenter.

Prabhakar Raghavan @WittedNote the VP of G Suite takes the stage. G Suite has 1.4 Billion users with 80,000 students. These will be our future employees. Companies like AirBus have chosen G Suite for collaboration.

Prabhakar mentions that they have three design principals for G Suite, Secure, Smart and Simple. Secure is cloud based, with two factor and G Suite security keys. Google Security center now has a new investigation tool for G Suite that looks at suspicious file transfer or egress data scenarios. It goes into beta today. G Suite now has data regions to enable you to localize mail boxes to certain geographies. It is generally available today.

You can know Google Sheets with natural language to quantify data and the formula will be generated for you. Prabhakar mentions that 10% of replies in G Mail are done through machine language through Smart Replies. Smart Replies are coming to Google hangouts. Smart Compose is the ability for the AI to learn your correspondence and add the number of machine responses based on learning how you interact with your contacts. Google translate can now take poor grammar and translate it to proper language through Grammar Translate.Google Calendar has enhanced scheduling to look at past patterns and find windows and locations that work across your target group.

Fei-Fei Li @drfeifei Google’s Chief Scientist for AI is introduced and announces the 3rd generation of Tensor Processing Units “TPUs”. Fei-Fei mentions AutoML which simplifies Machine Learning for customers. Fei-Fei announces AutoML Natural Language and AutoML Translation are now generally available to simplify the use of Machine Learning use for its customers.

VMware Horizon Suite

About Me

I am a Principal Cloud Architect at Long View Systems and have spent 16 years designing, implementing, and managing IT Infrastructures in highly available computing environments. My primary areas of focus are the deployment of virtualization (Server, Storage, Desktop, Application and WAN Optimization).